Automatic switching to dark mode based on system setting

Vlad

rafajrichard How do you imagine the UI for this?

tomasbedrich

Vlad I like this ternary switch of Prusa Connect

DR

Not OP, but I think it would best fit in the websites setting view. I don’t think it should go in the brush menu as it impacts all websites. Since appearance settings are for the appearance of the browser, it also would not make sense to go there (though this would be more intuitive). Therefore, I would advocate for placing it in website settings. There’s already a system in place there for defaults for websites, and overrides, so little extra effort would be needed for implementation. The brush menu theme setting would then be used to set website overrides. How does this sound?

Vlad

DR Note that Orion Dark mode just inverts colors. So if a website is already dark it would become light. this is why we didnt implement is browser wide, but as per site setting.

DR

Vlad Would it be possible to modify the script to check the current site theme in that case? I did see that script was open sourced at some point so I might take a look at it later and see what I can come up with. If most sites are generally a light theme by default then it may still be worth having this as a browser-wide setting, or at least have the option available for users to select which theme they want to use by default depending on the sites they generally visit. That is a good point though and it may be something to consider for the future rather than to implement immediately.

laptudirm

You could also use a dark website list like Dark Reader's Global Dark List. They have already built a lot of infrastructure around this detection, which might be integrated into in the future.

rafajrichard

The global setting could be hidden in appearance settings, same as current browser theme with Page Tweaks being the place to override the option for misbehaving sites/personal preference. There would however need to be an algorithm to detect if the site is already dark. The Global Dark List wouldn't work 100% because a user can sometimes toggle light/dark mode on the website and some websites can also sync with the system theme, in which case the orion dark mode should do nothing, since the site can provide dark mode best most of the time. Notable exception is my UNIs system (is.muni.cz - needs a login), where I am still using dark reader because it works much better than their solution.

Vlad

Would it be possible to modify the script to check the current site theme in that case

I do not know how could that be achieved, but our script is open source and community is welcome to help modify it.

https://github.com/OrionBrowser/DarkMode

RobAndrews

How about we just check the text colors and the background colors and seek to get light text on a dark background. Dark text on a dark background is unreadable, white text on white backgrounds are unreadable.

The goal is to be able to browse in the dark without lighting up the whole room and waking up our bunkmates.